Why is strdup considered to be evil

c c-strings
William Morris picture William Morris · Oct 20, 2012 · Viewed 26.2k times · Source

I've seen some posters stating that strdup is evil. Is there a consensus on this? I've used it without any guilty feelings and can see no reason why it is worse than using malloc/memcpy.

The only thing I can think might earn strdup a reputation is that callers might misuse it (eg. not realise they have to free the memory returned; try to strcat to the end of a strdup'ed string). But then malloc'ed strings are not free from the possibility of misuse either.

Thanks for the replies and apologies to those who consider the question unhelpful (votes to close). In summary of the replies, it seems that there is no general feeling that strdup is evil per se, but a general consensus that it can, like many other parts of C, be used improperly or unsafely.

There is no 'correct' answer really, but for the sake of accepting one, I accepted @nneoneo's answer - it could equally have been @R..'s answer.

Answer

nneonneo picture nneonneo · Oct 20, 2012

Two reasons I can think of:

  1. It's not strictly ANSI C, but rather POSIX. Consequently, some compilers (e.g. MSVC) discourage use (MSVC prefers _strdup), and technically the C standard could define its own strdup with different semantics since str is a reserved prefix. So, there are some potential portability concerns with its use.
  2. It hides its memory allocation. Most other str functions don't allocate memory, so users might be misled (as you say) into believing the returned string doesn't need to be freed.

But, aside from these points, I think that careful use of strdup is justified, as it can reduce code duplication and provides a nice implementation for common idioms (such as strdup("constant string") to get a mutable, returnable copy of a literal string).

Related questions

Strip first and last character from C string

I have a C string that looks like "Nmy stringP", where N and P can be any character. How can I edit it into "my string" in C?

Read More
C - split string into an array of strings

I'm not completely sure how to do this in C: char* curToken = strtok(string, ";"); //curToken = "ls -l" we will say //I need a array of strings containing "ls", "-l", and NULL for execvp() How would I go about doing this?

Read More
String termination - char c=0 vs char c='\0'

When terminating a string, it seems to me that logically char c=0 is equivalent to char c='\0', since the "null" (ASCII 0) byte is 0, but usually people tend to do '\0' instead. Is this purely out of preference …

Read More